Every LJ account comes with a (XMPP) chat account, which I just added to Pidgin to see if anyone else uses it. It appears nobody does BUT you're automatically made friends with Frank the goat, who appears to be an XMPP bot that makes posts to your LJ on your behalf. This is a totally useless feature.

As the title suggests, I've built a .deb (and done some rudimentary testing) of zfs-fuse 0.6.9 on Itanium Debian 6.0.5.

The rationale for this was:

I couldn't get FreeBSD to install on my zx6000, but Debian was no problem (I think this may be because Debian supports VGA console whereas FreeBSD doesn't, but I couldn't get serial working on my zx6000 either, so who knows).

I tried ZFSonLinux (ZoL) but the splat module gave a segfault on modprobe.

There is no IA64 binary package of zfs-fuse for squeeze (lame).

The source package of zfs-fuse fails to build on IA64 due to #error "ISA not supported" (super lame).

The only thing I had to do was rewrite the src/lib/libsolcompat/include/sys/isa_defs.h to include reasonable IA64 settings. From there I could do an apt-get --compile source on the new source and get a .deb to dpkg -i. I've never really used much Debian and have no idea what I'm doing with package managers so I don't know if I should distribute the .deb or not, but if you Google and find this post and want to know how to get zfs-fuse on IA64 squeeze, let me know.

I haven't done too much testing of it so far. I built a toy raidz with dedup and created and destroyed a few files and did a scrub. I should do an import of an external pool to make sure it's not completely broken. I'm quite happy, though, as this means it may be possible after all to put a file server on my zx6000, if a very slow one.

The man without a memory. He has no memory of the past and also cannot form memories. For all intents and purposes, he's not conscious, is he, in the literal sense of the word? I've always wondered how I would be without any self-consciousness. How much of who I am is because I remember who I'm supposed to be? I've absolutely no idea, but he seems fairly happy, all things considered.

Fortunately for him, he recognizes one person, his wife. I'd recommend watching how he interacts with her. It's not a long video and I'd suggest watching at least to the point where they explain that every time he sees his wife, he believes it's the first time he's seen her in years. It's kind of sweet that he reacts like that totally unaware that he does it presumably every day.

There's a story on Slashdot about using sodium chloride to improve hard drive density. For the past couple minutes I've been imagining biting into a hard drive platter and my teeth breaking and shattering. My teeth are really uncomfortable now and it's freaking me out.

I'm not the first person to have pumpkin pie with cranberry sauce, right? Either Jasna or my brother brought it up at Thanksgiving yesterday (as a joke?) and it turned out to be amazing, so I did the same at lunch at work today and people thought I was some sort of crazy pioneer. Admittedly I've never seen anyone else try it before, but it seems like such an obvious combination in retrospect.

When having an important phone conversation, the sort where you have to take notes, I end up writing notes on the stuff I say. Many times I've even written down my own name or phone number as I'm reading it out.

Every month or so I like to go to YouTube and watch this video and then this video just for the juxtaposition. Fred Durst is awesome.

(FYI I've heard an apocryphal story that Prince didn't tell anyone he was going to do a solo to My Guitar Gently Weeps and did it purely out of spite for not being nominated for some award or other and felt he was unfairly overlooked as a guitar player. I like to pretend the story is true simply because I like to live in a world where people say "fuck you" through guitar solos)

After spending about 20 minutes this morning shuttling money around, I decided to make a $20 donation to the GnuCash project. GnuCash is free software and is still definitely head and shoulders above any other financial software I've used. It's the only decent consumer-grade financial software package that enforces double-entry accounting practices, which makes me feel a lot better about things.

Dealing with the house means a lot of stuff flying around, cheques being written and borrowing money from relatives. This happening at the beginning of the month means I have bills and things to worry about on top of that. Plus since it's September I also have tuition to worry about. I have a system of 5 bank accounts which I shuttle money between according to how and when I need to spend it (some have higher interest rates but would take an extra few days to get access to). Canada has this Tax-Free Savings Account system which are wonderful for saving money in, but once you withdraw money you can't redeposit until the following year, so I can't treat them as totally liquid money (more like semipermeable membrane money, I guess).

Considering I can't anticipate when cheques are going to get cashed or how many days it's going to take for money to transfer, there's a lot that could go wrong in this scheme. My whole setup is focused around accounting for everything in GnuCash and I always have total confidence everything's going to work properly. I highly recommend it. It's more for people who like to be actively in charge of accounting for their money, I guess.

If you ask me, it puts the "accountability" into "accounting..ability".

They need to get some 3D charts going or something, though. Their charts look totally ghetto :(